


do you dream?

by jublis



Category: Osemanverse, Solitaire - Alice Oseman
Genre: Deep Conversations, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Light Angst, Nightmares, Post-Canon, mentions of depersonalization, michael and tori are SOULMATES and BEST FRIENDS, michael is the little spoon, someone needs to fill up the tag for this fandom and im taking the l for the team, things aren't okay but there's still good in the world, tori and i are arguably the same person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:00:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24630439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jublis/pseuds/jublis
Summary: Michael’s face tries to rearrange itself. She waits.After a few moments, Michael says, “Do you believe in fate?”Tori raises her eyebrows, resisting the urge to pull herself up into a sitting position. “I just said I don’t believe that there are things bigger than us.”Michael shakes his head. “That’s not what I asked.”A few months after Higgs goes up in flames, Tori Spring navigates life.
Relationships: Michael Holden & Victoria "Tori" Spring, Michael Holden/Victoria "Tori" Spring, Victoria "Tori" Spring & Charlie Spring
Comments: 10
Kudos: 23





	do you dream?

**Author's Note:**

> what is this????? a fic that ISN'T dead poets society??? 
> 
> hi! this is my first work in this fandom - god help me, i will fill up this tag myself if i have to - so please be kind! hope you enjoy this. see y'all at the end notes!

“If there is a God,” Michael says, “do you think he’d forgive us?”

Tori looks at him. He doesn’t look back. His arms are crossed under his head and his head is tilted up at the sky, the sun shining off his glasses. 

She can’t see his eyes. Something in her chest crawls.

It’s almost summer, but that hardly means anything. They’re laying next to each other on the grass and Tori’s pretty sure they’re supposed to be cloud watching, but it kind of feels like playing pretend. She tilts her head up and squints her eyes, but things don’t come into focus. Everything around her seems just slightly out of place - childlike scrawls with obnoxiously bright colors, a backdrop for a school play she never signed up for. She hasn’t done anything like this since she was eight and Charlie was seven and things didn’t seem so important.

Not to say that things aren’t important now. They  _ are _ . Of course they are. But that’s something Tori only knows in theory. She looks at her own reflection in the mirror every night before she goes to sleep - the everlasting bags under her eyes, the redness of skin where she’d been absently picking at it, every stray hair of her fringe. She tilts her head. Squints her eyes. Forces a smile and lets it fall.  _ This should mean something, _ she always thinks. Fingers running down the bridge of her nose, pulling at skin as if the act of tearing would make light pour from the inside out.  _ I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. _

In her head, Michael’s voice.  _ You need to be here. _

In an almost summer’s day, Tori Spring digs her fingernails into the palms of her hands and tries to understand what it feels like. Her fingers are numb and that feels like a terrible, terrible joke. The sky is clear and sharp and so blue it makes her teeth hurt, something in her chest tugging up, up, up.

Michael nuzzles her shoulder, hiding his face on her neck. The tip of his nose is freezing, but his breath is warm and his hair tickles her face, and the knot in Tori’s throat unravels so suddenly it leaves her breathless. She doesn’t dare move, except - she rests her cheek on top of Michael’s hair, almost featherlike, giving him the chance to pull away. He doesn’t. 

“You’re ignoring me,” he says, childlike. “Answer the question, love.”

The pet name. Tori smiles in spite of herself, in spite of the person in her mirror every day. 

“If God is real,” she says, “do you think  _ we  _ should forgive  _ him _ ?”

Michael huffs a laugh on her neck, making her squirm. “That’s not what I asked,” he says. “Every fucked up thing that’s happened in history is on  _ our  _ shoulders. God  _ did  _ give us all free will.”

“Well, that was a stupid ass decision,” Tori says. 

Michael pulls himself up by his elbows, looking down at her. His mismatched eyes are twinkling and Tori doesn’t feel like running. “Not religious, are you?” he asks, cheerily, though he already knows the answer. 

Tori rolls her eyes. “Me? Believing that we are all part of something bigger? That would be highly out of character.”

Michael’s face suddenly does that thing where it collapses into itself - the upwards tilt of his mouth falls, and his eyes widen, and he bites the inside of his cheek as if chewing on the words he means to say, tasting them to see if they’re worth saying at all. 

Tori doesn’t know when she got so good at reading people. Maybe she’s not good at reading people at all. Maybe she’s just good at reading Michael. Her therapist once tried to suggest that maybe she spent too much time with Michael - maybe it was bordering on codependency, maybe it was time for Tori to step back and try to fix herself, instead of expecting someone to fill up every broken piece of her. Her first therapist loved her  _ maybes _ , even when they both knew she wasn’t saying anything theoretical. 

Tori had walked out of the room without saying another word. It was her third session, and she never saw the woman again. Her parents had screamed at her, of course. What a waste of their money, their time, if she did want to get better, she’d be  _ trying harder.  _

They screamed themselves hoarse. Tori didn’t say a word. 

Charlie said, “Let’s make her an appointment with Doctor Michaels.” 

Doctor Michaels was Charlie’s therapist, and her name was a fortunate irony; he’d been seeing her for nearly two years then, and he never breathed her name out loud. But for Tori, he did. 

Later, Tori asked why. She was sitting on his bed, hugging her knees to her chest. He was eleven months younger and five inches taller and their eye bags matched now, too. 

Charlie shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t leave Nick.”

Her first appointment was the Sunday after that. It’s been two months.

Michael’s face tries to rearrange itself. She waits.

After a few moments, Michael says, “Do you believe in fate?”

Tori raises her eyebrows, resisting the urge to pull herself up into a sitting position. “I just said I don’t believe that there are things bigger than us.”

Michael shakes his head. “That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

He tilts his face in an angle that makes the sunlight bounce directly off his glasses and into her eyes, and she closes them. Still, she can see in her mind’s eye the exact shape his mouth forms when he forms the words. “Do you dream, Tori?”

_ Do you dream? _

“No,” she says, and it’s a lie. They both know it. 

Sometimes she wakes up choking on smoke, her skin so hot it feels about to burst. In her dreams, there’s a burning boy and a burning girl, their bodies alight with fire. She twirls and twirls close and away from him; he steps left-right-left and tips her over his knee, and their lips never touch. The music never ends. They dance, and dance, and dance. 

“I don’t dream,” she says again, “because dreams are good. But. I have nightmares.”

She’s reaching out, she realizes, after the words are said. She’s letting Michael in. Her heart flutters.

Michael doesn’t miss a beat. “ _ Nightmare _ is such a weird word,” he says, with an aloofness that would almost seem rude, if she didn’t know him. “Who’d you think came up with it?”

“Someone who though bad memories were like rabid animals,” Tori says. She doesn’t know where the words come from. “Animals that find you at night. They always find you.”

“Maybe they always find you because they are you,” Michael says. His tone isn’t light anymore, but it isn’t angry, and Tori’s fingers aren’t numb anymore. “And you can’t outrun yourself.”

A dream where her skin is made of glass but it still bleeds. If she presses too hard down on her own flesh, it splinters. Shards of glass under her skin. The blood tastes like sour candy in her mouth. The roar of fire in her ears.

“Wherever you go, you take yourself with you,” she says.

Michael looks at her, startled, and a grin quickly takes his whole face. “Neil Gaiman,” he says, delighted. “Thought you only knew your classics. What was that, about not reading?”

Tori feels her face heat up. “Charlie’s going through a Neil Gaiman phase and he says reading out loud helps him focus better,” she says. Apparently, he and Nick were watching Good Omens on TV when Nick had his second bisexual awakening because of David Tennant, or something like that. Anyway, Charlie bought a box of Neil Gaiman classics and is currently halfway through  _ The Graveyard Book. _ “He gets into it.”

Michael chuckles. “Sure, sure.” 

Tori doesn’t try to argue more. Her face is still warm. Michael notices, because of course he does, and he presses his cold fingers against her cheeks, cooing with excitement. “Are you blushing?” he says, the smile practically swallowing his voice. “Victoria Spring, are you blushing?”

“It’s cause you’re pissing me off,” she tries to say, but it sounds half-hearted even to her own ears. “I blush when I’m angry.”

Michael flops down next to her again, his head still leaning on her shoulder. Inexplicably, Tori wants to put her arm around him and pull him closer, so she does that.

Huh. 

“You get angry a lot around me, then?” Michael asks, cheekily.

“I’m always angry,” she echoes. Tori can feel his smile against her neck. “But maybe not right now,” she mumbles into his hair, trying not to flinch at this confession. This confession of … she doesn’t really know. Want. Love. Safety.  _ Need _ . Nobody’s supposed to see how much she needs.

But Michael needs her, too. 

She presses him closer against her, until they’re practically cuddling on the grass in a public place. The sky's still blue, so blue. But with this warmth next to her, she doesn’t feel like she’s about to be swallowed whole anymore. And for a moment, that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. 

**Author's Note:**

> sooo yeah
> 
> hope you guys enjoyed that! i'm pretty new to the osemanverse but lemme tell you.....i love all of these characters so much. this is not the last you see of me.
> 
> as always, kudos and comments are appreciated! and if you feel like it, feel free to bother me on my twitter @bornfrombeauty :D


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